After running through 52 Games challenge, and playing games that looked interesting and seeing the difference between being interested and being hooked on something. For a lot of those games, I'm not really interested in trying to overcome a challenge if the game doesn't have that *something* that makes me want to bother. Then there are games that do and I will certainly attempt to challenge or handicap myself in order to complete some sort of goal.
And in this my latest challenge in Civilization V, which was initially to just attempt a 1 City Challenge victory on Amazon Plus. Amazon Plus is one of the built-in maps that is a large wide open area, and this presents a different set of challenges because the resources are very limited at the beginning of the game. There are other issues in general with 1-city, and that is it is difficult to win a science victory, impossible to win cultural and hard for dom, presuming you have those conditions enabled. I had attempted this run about 5 times before I got some sort of system figured out. My first few attempts were on King and then down to Prince, and lost Culture to Iroquois and a few other games had an overzealous France.
So the settings were: random civ (Assyria), Prince, Amazon Plus, random size, random opponents, 1-city, raging barbarians, victory conditions enabled: science, diplomacy. The biggest threat was, by far, the Aztecs being present in the game. My goal was to run through Piety, get the Barbarian conversion ability through religion, then capture barbs and donate them to city states. Having only 1 city has the drawbacks that 1) you can't afford large armies and 2) your prod gets cut if you are housed. Now this isn't like some games where you can't add new units if pop-capped, you can still make new units, and buy them with faith but you take a prod penalty. At one point my penalty was -70% which is huge.
In the entire game I only made a handful of military for myself. 1 archer, 1 cannon and 4 bi-planes. All of my other military was from scout/ruin upgrades, or from missionaries turning barbarians. Considering the Aztecs, I had to do everything in my power to make them my friend so they wouldn't attack me. That meant converting them early to my religion which did a lot early on. Later on when the other civs were being wiped out by them (because I was paying Montezuma to attack them), it got pretty close to where I was scared he would attack me. So I then went right into gold production and would give the Aztecs 500 gold every 10 turns to keep them happy. They got to the second SS booster by the time I won diplomatic victory.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2447070227